Offering self-service options are great, but how can you actually know if your customer service knowledge base is successful?

It’s widely known that customers prefer to solve problems on their own without needing to contact support. What’s not so well known is how to tell if you’re actually good at providing self-service.

The self-service movement has been strong in recent years. According to a study done by Zendesk, 69% of customers try to troubleshoot their own problems before contacting support.

Self-service support not only gives your customers what they want, but it also takes the support load off of agents.

As less-complex tickets are eliminated by customers using your knowledge base, agents become more focused on difficult technical problems.

Simply standing up a knowledge base isn’t enough to meet your customers’ needs. If you build it and then forget about it, you’re going to miss out on opportunities to optimize self-service support.

Even worse, you’re going to create frustration amongst your customers. Having a plan for continuously improving your knowledge base is critical.

But how do you know what needs to be improved? How do you know if your knowledge base is working?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single way to answer these questions. As you’ll see in this article, you need insight into a number of different metrics to get a good understanding of the performance of your knowledge base.

Comparing those metrics side-by-side will start to reveal valuable insights.

Here are eight things to measure in order to understand the performance of your customer service knowledge base.

1. Overall Traffic

Understanding how many visits your knowledge base gets is a great place to start. This metric alone isn’t going to give you a ton of clarity, but it’s important to know at a high-level how much traffic your knowledge base is getting so that you can compare this metric with the other metrics below.

For example, if you have thousands of users and hundreds of monthly support tickets but only a couple dozen monthly visits to your knowledge base, you need to know that.

t’s possible your customers just aren’t aware of your knowledge base, which you can change by making it more prominent on your site or sending a message to your customers.

On the other hand, this could also indicate a bug within your knowledge base that needs fixing.

Paying attention to your traffic helps uncover multiple problems and dictates your next steps.

2. Most Read/Unread Articles

As your product evolves, you’ll have an increasing number of articles in your knowledge base. Knowing which of these articles gets the most amount of reads and the least amount of reads can be an indicator of a number of things.

For example, your getting started guide might have a really low number of reads, all while your support team is getting slammed with onboarding questions.

This might be an indicator that your getting started guide needs to be baked into the product or the onboarding process.

Likewise, an article with a high number of views might indicate an area of the product that’s difficult to use and needs some attention.

3. Support Ticket Volume

Support volume is another metric that isn’t going to give you much insight on its own. But it’s imperative to know ticket volume as you start to look at some of the other key metrics for measuring the success of your customer service knowledge base.

As your knowledge base improves, you should also expect to see the number of support tickets you receive per customer decreasing.

For example, let’s say you saw a huge spike in support volume during a recent feature release. It turns out you shipped a feature but failed to publish supporting documentation for it, so your support team got flooded with tickets.

That spike in support tickets ultimately indicated the need for additional documentation. That’s a lesson you can use to avoid those support tickets in future releases.

On a more granular level, you should understand which support inquiries could have been solved with documentation or self-help resources.

If you’re getting a ton of support tickets related to topics covered in your docs, your knowledge base isn’t doing its job.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of viewers who navigate away from your site after viewing just a single page. In other words, these folks walk through the door and turn right back around.

A high bounce rate on your help center means your knowledge base is unsuccessful. It could indicate a poor user experience, poor readability, errors, irrelevant content, or some other issue.

While a high bounce rate should be concerning, you should also remember that if your help center is doing its job some users will find the help they need immediately and then leave the page.

This means a visitor bouncing isn’t always an indicator of an issue with your knowledge base.

If your knowledge base can track visitor behavior, you may be able to report on which users bounce from your knowledge base and then still submit a ticket.

This metric is revealing because it helps you understand visitor behavior at a more granular level.

5. Search Metrics

A good knowledge base allows users to search for the content they’re looking for, meaning many knowledge base platforms include search metrics within their reporting.

Google Analytics can also be a great way to capture search metrics within your knowledge base. Search metrics indicate whether or not users are finding what they’re searching for.

For example, if you see a lot of queries for “single sign-on” that aren’t rendering any results, it’s probably time to write some documentation about single sign-on.

Similarly, if you’re seeing a ton of queries for “email customizations” that do get results, this is an indicator that your customers are really interested in email customizations and often need help with it.

It’s probably a good idea to update your existing help articles and fill in any gaps about this topic.

6. Surveys & Customer Feedback

Surveys provide qualitative insights that other metrics and dashboards don’t. Survey your customers annually or bi-annually about their overall support experience, including what they think about your self-help resources.

You’ll be surprised by what you learn. You can use these insights to make a plan for improving your knowledge base.

Many knowledge base platforms also have a simple voting system that enables readers to flag specific content as helpful or not helpful. Use this ongoing feedback to understand the effectiveness of your content and to consistently make improvements.

7. Usability Tests

Just like web designers conduct usability tests to understand how user-friendly a website is, content designers can conduct usability tests to understand how effective their knowledge base is.

Select a handful of active customers and spend 30 minutes with them. Observe how they use your knowledge base. Can they find answers to certain problems?

Do they know how to navigate to your docs from within your application? If they can’t find an answer, can they easily figure out how to contact your support team?

Usability testing can be time-consuming, but it’s a great way to get rich insights about your knowledge base that you won’t find in quantitative metrics.

8. Self-service score

There isn’t a single perfect metric for measuring the success of your knowledge base, but Zendesk—one of our integration partners—suggests a self-service score is one vital metric.

To calculate your self-service score, you’ll need two of the metrics discussed above: traffic and support ticket volume.

Self-service score = Total user sessions of your help center / Total users in tickets

This formula gives you a ratio that helps you understand your help center’s effectiveness.

For instance, if 12,000 users visited your help center last month and 1000 submitted tickets, your ratio would be 12:1.

The higher the first number, the better your help center does at solving customer problems.

Conclusion

The best way to measure how successful your knowledge base is requires taking a holistic view.

By tracking and analyzing the metrics shared above, you’ll be blending quantitative and qualitative insights that help you more fully understand how your customers view your help center.

This is how you’ll get useful insights that you can leverage to improve the future success of your knowledge base.

If you’re just getting started with building a knowledge base, check out 5 Practices For Creating a Customer Service Knowledge Base.

The post 8 Ways to Measure Your Customer Service Knowledge Base Success appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

These are some of the best tools you can integrate with Zendesk Support based on our experiences, but there are many else out there.

There’s a good reason why Zendesk is one of the most popular helpdesk solutions on the market. It comes equipped with a robust set of features to fit the needs of a small startup as well as those of a large enterprise.

But every now and then something falls through the cracks, and that’s perfectly natural. You can’t expect one app to do everything. But fear not, Zendesk has a solution for this as well. Apart from being able to configure your workflows, views, macros, and whatnot, you can also customize your Zendesk experience via a multitude of 3rd party apps and integrations.

As of 2020, there are more than 500 apps and integrations available in the Zendesk marketplace, featuring categories such as Productivity & Time-Tracking, IT & Project Management, Surveys & Feedback, and many more.

Why use Zendesk Apps & Integrations?

Usually, there are 3 main reasons why you may want to consider using a 3rd party app with Zendesk.

You want features not available in Zendesk Support

Zendesk’s suite does a great many things, but quite frankly, not everything. There may come a time when you need to do something not covered by Zendesk’s impressive feature set, such as to measure Net Promoter Score or to set up an internal QA process. 3rd party integrations help you do that from an already comfortable environment of Zendesk.

You want to improve existing functionality

At its core, Zendesk Support is a ticketing system and that’s what it’s going to be best at. If you require more advanced features in one of its niche offerings, such as more customizable CSAT surveys, or more granular reporting, a specialized tool may be what you’re looking for.

You want to share data between different platforms

Chance is you are already using several different business platforms today. Your email campaigns live in MailChimp, your support data in Zendesk, your sales communication in Pipedrive, and whatnot.

Having user data in silos is a big no-no in 2020 and as such should be avoided. One of the ways to do that is to integrate your tools via APIs so they can share information and communicate with each other.

Best apps in Zendesk Marketplace

To help you do that, we’ve compiled this list of the most helpful Apps & Integrations for Zendesk Support based on our personal experiences as well as customer reviews.

The best app to keep your agents updated: Notify

5 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

Let’s start with some low-hanging fruit. Zendesk Support does many things very well, but real-time notifications are not one of them. Notify creates a pop-up notification feed with updates about ticket events inside of every agent’s interface.

Notify allows you to define different notifications for different ticket events, as well as who should receive them. Not only will you never miss an update again, but it also helps you get rid of all that Zendesk clutter in your mailbox.

What do Notify’s customers say?

The best app for measuring customer satisfaction: Nicereply

5 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

Now that you’re never going to miss a ticket assigned to you, it’s time to reply to it. But how will you know if your reply was any good? Well, that’s where customer feedback comes in. Nicereply helps you collect customer feedback via email satisfaction surveys.

You can trigger the surveys automatically, after resolving a ticket or place them in the signature of every email you send out. This way you can measure the most popular customer service quality metrics – Customer Satisfaction, Customer Effort Score, and Net Promoter Score.

What’s more, you can also see all this data within Zendesk as a custom field, comment, and a handy sidebar widget.

What do Nicereply’s customers say?

The best phone app: CloudTalk

5 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

You can accomplish a lot over an email or a chat nowadays, but sometimes the best way to go is a good, old-fashioned phone call.

CloudTalk puts a modern spin on this and lets you both make and receive calls via their cloud call center solution. It comes packed with over 40 advanced call center features as well as 25+ integrations to help you set up a workflow that fits your business.

Every time you receive an incoming call, the caller’s profile with his entire customer history comes up, so you know who’s calling you and what to expect even before you pick up the phone.

What do CloudTalk’s customers say?

The best app for internal quality assurance: Klaus

5 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

Customer feedback helps you improve your responses and overall service quality, but some replies should’ve never reached your customers in the first place. That’s where your internal QA comes in. Klaus let’s other agents review any conversation in your Zendesk account, rate it, and leave helpful feedback.

You can track your internal quality score and use it to motivate and educate your agents.

What do Klaus’s customers say?

The best app for managing shifts: Tymeshift Workforce Management

4 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

Providing support over multiple channels can be tough. Adding other perks, such as supporting multiple timezones, or 24h support only makes it harder. The more channels, customers, and time-zones you support, the harder it becomes to schedule your shifts. Tymeshift comes to combat this via its modern workforce management software. With Tymeshift, you’ll be able to set your weekly shifts and recurring schedules, as well as give your agents an easy to use tool to switch shifts with others or request time off.

You can also track how much time is spent on what tasks, set scores and leaderboards for your team, and even see in real-time who’s working on what.

What do Tymeshift’s customers say?

The best time-saving app: TypeGenie

5 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

Every product has it’s quirks, which often leads to answering a lot of similar tickets. At least until it gets fixed (yeah, right?). This naturally leads to a lot of repetition in the agent’s work. TypeGenie is a nifty little tool that helps you cut down on that repetition as much as possible via smart auto-complete.

It learns from your style of writing to keep a consistent tone of voice + it can do this in multiple languages.

What do TypeGenie’s customers say?

The best app for understanding your customer’s problem: FullStory

4 stars rating on Zendesk marketplace

We like to think we’re always there for our customers, but sometimes they can make things hard. It’s one thing to solve an issue, but another entirely when you have no idea what’s the customer talking about. I’m sure you’ve received a ticket like that before.

Fortunately, FullStory helps to alleviate this issue by allowing you to watch “session replays” of everything a given user did on your website before they sent you a ticket.

No longer do you have to rely on customers’ descriptions of problems. Now you can just see it on your own.

Build your own support stack

These are some of the best tools you can integrate with Zendesk Support based on our experiences, but there are many else out there. It’s now up to you to define, what needs to be done to enhance your workflows. Integrating a new app is usually just a matter of few clicks in the Zendesk Marketplace, so don’t hesitate to start exploring!

Also if you think there’s a great app out there that we’ve missed, feel free to reach out to us at editor@nicereply.com to let us know! Have fun building your support stack.

The post 7 Zendesk Support Apps to Improve Your Service appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

They call it a north star metric for a reason, and if CSAT is indeed your north star, it should never stray too far from sight.

Apart from customer satisfaction, there are plenty of other KPIs and metrics your support team is probably measuring today.

You have your average response times, your first contact resolutions, SLAs, resolution times….just name it. In fact it can be very easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of KPIs you’re measuring.

As I once heard by someone smart (I wish I could remember who it was), KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, and if you’re measuring more than 5 of these, then they are probably not that K.

To combat this, the methodology of the so-called “North star metric” started to gain prominence amongst Silicon Valley companies. Whatever metric you decide to focus on, it should be (as the North Star itself is) visible. So let’s take a look at how visible you can make your customer satisfaction data within Zendesk, using several different methods.

Viewing CSAT using Zendesk Support

First let’s take a look at what can you achieve using only Zendesk Support. For this part of this post we’re going to assume you’re using Zendesk’s built-in CSAT solution, but we’ll talk about using a dedicated 3rd party CSAT tool later on. If you’re not using either at the moment and are unsure which way to go, check out our “Pros and Cons of Using the Built-in Zendesk CSAT Solution” post.

Every agent can see their CSAT data in their Zendesk Support dashboard. Here they can see the number of good and bad tickets for the last week as well as their overall CSAT over the last 60 days (including the current day).

The good

As it usually is with native solutions, the good thing is there is next to no setup required. As soon as you enable Zendesk’s CSAT in your account and start collecting ratings, agents will be able to see this report in their dashboard.

The view is also very simple and doesn’t flood the agents with unnecessary information, which can also be considered a plus.

The bad

If I were to say it with one word, it would be “limited”. If I were to use two words, the other one would be “very”.

Agents can only see their statistics and there is no way for them to see statistics of others. They are also limited to seeing only the data for the past week (or 60 days in terms of overall account satisfaction).

Another thing missing is context. Proliferated marketing saying goes like this “Content is King, but context is Queen”, and this holds true when discussing in feedback as well. While Support’s dashboard shows you WHAT kind of feedback you’ve got, there is no easy way to drill down and see WHERE it came from.

Viewing CSAT using Zendesk Explore

Another option to use Zendesk’s analytics & reporting tool – Zendesk Explore. Using it, you can find a Satisfaction tab within the Zendesk Support dashboard inside of the product tray in Zendesk Explore. Sounds complicated? A little, yes.

This dashboard provides you with a better overview of satisfaction across your entire Zendesk account. This view is more suited for managers, and since it needs to be shared by an Explore administrator first, most agents probably won’t have access to it.

In Explore you can view your overall CSAT score for the account, number of good and bad tickets, bad to good ratio as well as response rate of your CSAT survey.

Apart from this, you can also see CSAT displayed in time, as well as grouped by attributes, such as channels and languages.

The good

The entire dashboard is much more robust and informative, than the basic dashboard provided by Support’s insights. Explore provides admins and managers with a lot of information at a glance in an organized fashion.

Filtering and grouping CSAT by attributes allows you to analyze performance of different languages, channels and other parameters to pinpoint where you need to improve.

Charts are easy to read and enable you to compare and predict your performance.

The bad

First of all the data displayed in Explore’s dashboard is limited to the last year. Want to see older data? Too bad.

The fact that it’s a totally separate product used to view data from Support doesn’t exactly scream intuitive. You get the basic (Lite) plan of Zendesk Export for free if you’re on Zendesk Professional or Enterprise plan (which you need to be to use their CSAT), however, if you’d like to customize your dashboards as well as some other advanced features, Explore is going to cost you an additional $9 per agent.

Lastly, even though great for high-level analysis, Explore still lacks the ability to drill down into specific cases, to see the feedback in context to its respective ticket.

Viewing CSAT using Zendesk Satisfaction Console

Now unlike previous options, Zendesk Satisfaction is less of a dashboard and more of a deep dive tool. It’s an app found in the marketplace, that allows you to access, search, and analyze CSAT results. You can filter cases, drill down to individual tickets as well as export results.

The good

Using Satisfaction Console finally allows you to see feedback in context to customer conversation.

The bad

First of all, it’s yet another tool you need to rely on, to get a complex view of your customer satisfaction.

And it’s not a free tool either. Unlike Explore which at least comes with a basic version available to everyone using Zendesk, if you want to use Zendesk’s Satisfaction Console, it’s going to cost you $1 per agent/month.

Viewing CSAT using a 3rd party solution

We’ve just introduced 3 different tools made by Zendesk, that you can use to view your CSAT data. So why should you consider using a 3rd party solution? Apart from the obvious benefits like greater customizability, and more survey options, you’ll get a more holistic approach to viewing your data.

Instead of a combination of using Zendesk Support, Zendesk Explore and Zendesk Satisfaction Console app, you’ll be able to view all your data in a single environment designed to show you just that and not 100 other things you’re not interested in.

Viewing CSAT using Nicereply

Let’s delve into specifics and take a look how you can use Nicereply to view your CSAT data collected from Zendesk tickets.

Using the CSAT Overview screen you can see your CSAT score, average rating value as well as number of ratings collected. Below it you’ll find handy charts of how your CSAT and number of responses change in time. You can also see a histogram of your ratings, as well as number of surveys sent, their open rate and their response rate.

Not only can you see the stats, you can also see the feedback in context to rated tickets. On the Rating feed screen you’ll find a real time updated dashboard of all your feedback, with links to their respective Zendesk tickets.

You can also compare your agents, or teams to see which agents are your stars and who may need some additional training.

Apart from that you can also see average satisfaction levels of your customers, and all negative feedback listed together to be addressed.

In terms of reporting you can also set notifications, to receive email as soon as new feedback arrives, or export your data to a *.CSV file for further analysis.

The good

First of all you don’t have to use 3 separate tools to get a complete view of your customer satisfaction. Using a 3rd party solution (Nicereply in this case) allows you to view CSAT of your entire company, of different teams, agents and even customers.

You can also easily understand the context behind each individual feedback thanks to a ticket link.

Lastly, Nicereply also pushes CSAT rating and comment back to the Zendesk ticket as a custom value and a note, so you can see the basic data about a ticket without even leaving your Zendesk Support. You can also set automations in Zendesk, based on the value of the CSAT rating (for example, reopen the ticket if it receives a rating of 3 or lower).

The bad

Even though it’s just one extra app and not three, it’s still a new tool that will require time to set up and train your staff.

There’s also extra costs associated with running a 3rd party CSAT tool.

Viewing CSAT using Nicereply Zendesk widget

Nicereply’s Zendesk integration also comes with a nifty little tool called Zendesk widget. This widget allows you to see your data directly in your Zendesk account. After installing Nicereply widget you will see company ratings, dashboards, total number of ratings and average scores directly in Zendesk. The ratings will be also sorted by specific agent, customer, ticket, or you can see ratings for the whole company.

The good

The great thing is you’re getting access to a very clean dashboard of the most important data related to your customer satisfaction. The best thing is you don’t have to leave your Zendesk Support to view it.

The bad

Apart from the downsides of using a 3rd party tool covered above, there are no additional downsides. Nicereply widget doesn’t incur any extra costs and is very easy to set up.

Don’t lose sight of your north star

No matter which way (or a combination) of viewing your CSAT data you choose, make sure it stays visible for you and your team. They call it a north star metric for a reason, and if CSAT is indeed your north star, it should never stray too far from sight…

The post How to view CSAT data in Zendesk appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

You need to consider the features you need, the scope of your feedback program, the price you are willing to pay as well as compatibility with your current tech-stack.

Customer satisfaction is a fantastic north-pole metric for your support team. It allows you to keep a finger at the pulse of your customer interactions, shows you areas of improvement, and gives your entire team as well as every individual agent something to strive forward. And Zendesk’s native CSAT tool is a great start to all this.

Once you’ve been working with CSAT for a while though, you start noticing certain limitations, such as lack of control, customization, and variety in Zendesk’s CSAT surveys.

The solution to this is to implement a 3rd party survey solution. Zendesk’s app marketplace boasts an impressive list of 83 different apps in the Survey & Feedback category alone. It might be very easy to get overwhelmed by this number. To help you decide, we’ve put together a comparison of the 10 most popular solutions.

Comparing Zendesk-compatible CSAT solutions

We’ve divided the feature sets of all compared apps into 3 main categories:

• Survey and Distribution options – What metrics can you measure? How can you customize your surveys? What degree of control do you have about how are your surveys delivered?
• Analytics and Insights – What can you do with the data you’ve collected? How siloed is the feedback from your Zendesk account? What insights can you draw from this data?
• Additional features – A collection of smaller features, that may or may not tip the scales, such as are the surveys “one-click”? Is the solution mobile-ready? What Zendesk plans to support this solution?

Here’s a list of all the compared solutions:

• Zendesk’s native CSAT
• Delighted
• Qualtrics
• SurveyMonkeyCX
• Nicereply
• Surveypal
• Stella Connect
• SmileBack
• Simplesat
• Customer Thermometer

Survey and Distribution options comparison

Customer Satisfaction surveys

CSAT is the oldest and most widely used customer satisfaction metric and as such, we expected every survey tool worth its salt to support it. We weren’t disappointed. Out of the 10 most popular survey solution for Zendesk, all 10 support CSAT surveys.

Customer Effort Score surveys

CES is currently the rising star of CX metrics. based on research by CEB, it’s a fantastic predictor of loyalty, and it helps your discover friction points that frustrate your customers. An added benefit is that CES synergizes well with CSAT. You can read more about measuring multiple CX metrics simultaneously with your Zendesk account here. Out of the 10 solutions, only Nicereply, Delighted, Qualtrics, Surveymonkey, and Surveypal support CES surveys.

Net Promoter Score surveys

NPS is a staple of all CX programs. This ultimate question, as called by Fred Reichheld, was found to be the best predictor of customer loyalty and future growth by research conducted by Bain & Co. Zendesk doesn’t support NPS in its native survey solution. Out of all the 3rd party solutions, only SmileBack currently doesn’t support Net Promoter Score.

In-signature surveys

Placing a survey into the signature of every e-mail you send out leads to a dramatic rise in your survey response rate. Some of our customers report seeing increases of more than 300% after implementing in-signature CSAT surveys. If you’re not sure why we’re so enthusiastic about this technology, read our blog about in-signature vs. after resolution surveys. Out of all the compared tools, only Nicereply and Customer Thermometer let you do this.

After resolution surveys

Surveying customers after their ticket gets resolved is the more traditional approach to running customer satisfaction surveys, and as such, is supported by all the tools we’ve been testing.

NPS campaigns

Some companies survey NPS after the resolution, some even survey it during every contact with their customer, but the most traditional way to measure NPS is to send a campaign email to all your customers, or a selected segment. Out of the tested solutions only Zendesk’s native survey tool, SmileBack, and Customer Thermometer don’t support this distribution method.

Customizable trigger settings

Sometimes you may not want your survey to go off to every customer. Maybe you want to survey only customers contacting support regarding a specific product, or customers from a specific region. Or perhaps you’d like to see whether you’ll get better data by surveying 24 hours after resolution on 48 hours after resolution. Customizable trigger settings allow you to do this. The good news is with the exception of Qualtrics, Surveypal, Simplesat, and Customer Thermometer, every tool supports this.

Advanced survey customization

Customizing your survey is a great way to get more feedback from your customers. Asking the right questions will bring out the right kind of answers while customizing the look of your survey to match your brand will make your surveys look more trustworthy. You can read more about customizing surveys here. Delighted, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Niereply, Surveypall, and Stella Connect all provide advanced options to customize your surveys.

Different rating scales for CSAT

NPS has a rating scale of 0 to 10, CES has a rating scale of 1 to 7. CSAT bears no such restriction and can be interpreted using a plethora of different scales and symbols. Being able to choose gives you more options to improve response rates and overall quality of your feedback. Delighted, Nicereply, Survepal, Stella Connect, and Simplesat all feature several different scales you can use with your CSAT surveys.

Analytics and Insights

Data visualization

Data are like eggs. They taste much easier to consume when processed. Seeing your customer feedback displayed on a nice chart with trends and histograms makes it not only more comprehensible but also more useful for future forecasting. Out of all the tested solutions, only Zendesk’s native tool and Stella Connect lag behind in this regard.

Leaderboards

Seeing your overall CSAT is one thing, but being able to drill down to individual level and rank your agents gives you unprecedented insights in terms of training and rewarding your agents. Nicereply and Surveypal are the only tools to offer this functionality.

Ticket backlink

I’ll borrow a pearl of marketing wisdom here: “If content is king, then context is queen.” Being able to read customer feedback is good, but knowing exactly to which conversation does it relate is amazing! Ticket backlink takes you from the specific feedback to its respective Zendesk ticket with a click of a button. Both Nicereply and Surveypal allow you to do this.

Pushing notes back to tickets

With customer feedback being pushed back into the Zendesk ticket in the form of a note, you no longer have to leave your Zendesk account to see what your customers thought. You can see both the numerical value as well as additional comments in the note. Despite it being quite useful, only Nicereply and Customer Thermometer allow you to do this.

Pushing tags back to tickets

Tags are shorter than notes and contain less information, but if you use them properly, you can utilize them to set up automation based on feedback values. Nicereply and Surveypal are the only tested survey tools that allow you to do this out of the box.

Native Zendesk widget

With a native widget, you can utilize Zendesk’s sidebar to display additional information about your customer interactions, giving you even more insights without ever having to leave Zendesk at all. Nicereply and Surveypal are the only solutions that come with a native Zendesk widget.solutions that come with a native Zendesk widget.

Additional features

Email notifications

Sometimes customer feedback merits an immediate response. In situations like this, it’s good to be notified even when not in your survey app. Fortunately, all of the solutions tested support email notifications.

One-click surveys

In Nicereply we call this “instant ratings”. What it means, is that the survey response is recorded as soon as the customer clicks any of the rating links provided in the survey. Even if they don’t finish the survey and leave, their initial response is still captured. Zendesk, Delighted, Nicereply, Stella Connect, Smileback, Simplesat, and Customer Thermometer all can do this.

Mobile-ready surveys

As of 2020, the mobile trend has been with us for more than 10 years. More than half of all the survey responses received by Nicereply customers are sent via mobile devices. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to make sure your surveys look on mobile devices at least as good as on classic desktops (if not better). Fortunately, apart from Zendesk’s CSAT and Surveymonkey, all other solutions come with mobile-ready satisfaction surveys.

Availability at different Zendesk plans

Unlike Salesforce, Zendesk does not restrict their API to their higher plans, so all of the solutions work with any level of Zendesk plan. The exception here is Zendesk’s native solution that only becomes available once you move up to a Professional or an Enterprise plan.

Choosing the right CSAT solution for Zendesk

In business, there’s rarely a silver bullet to solve all your problems, and the same goes for picking your customer satisfaction survey tool. You need to consider the features you need, the scope of your feedback program, the price you are willing to pay as well as compatibility with your current tech-stack.

Hold on, don’t go yet!

We also made a detailed comparison of the most popular tools and makes it easier for you to decide and choose the right solution for your business. You can download it here:

The post Comparing 10 Most Popular CSAT Survey Solutions for Zendesk appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Each of these metrics asks a different question and aims to address a different part of the experience you provide.

Every business, product, and support team is bound to have some quirks and weak spots. Some, you know about, but some remain yet to be discovered. But guess what. Oftentimes your customers discover things about your product still hidden to your team.

In psychology, we refer to this as the Johari window – a framework for self-awareness framework developed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955.

It’s the blind spot of Johari Window, where customer feedback can really make the difference.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Zendesk

Measuring customer satisfaction is a great way to start exploring it. Asking your customers about their experience with you shows that you care, it gives them a voice, and most importantly, provides you with useful data. Data, which you can use to fill in your blind spot. Once you know what the issue is, you can use this knowledge to improve your product, educate your agents, or tweak your support process to fix those issues.

Zendesk has a native, though a somewhat rudimentary solution to help you start doing this. You can use it to survey your customers via email survey after you resolve their support tickets.

Alternatively, you can choose a dedicated tool to get an access to a wider array of options and customizations, like different scales, placing surveys inside of conversation emails, and branding the survey. You can read more about whether to get a dedicated survey tool or not here.

Moving past CSAT

While CSAT surveys will provide you with plenty of feedback, in the beginning, chances are you’ll hit a point of diminishing return as you start moving into the higher 90s of your CSAT score. As you implement all the low-hanging fruit, you’ll start to get less and less new actionable feedback from the same CSAT survey.

One solution might be to change the wording of your CSAT survey question to combat this. A better way to combat this would be to introduce a new survey into your feedback program. Perhaps one with a slightly different focus than CSAT.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. There is currently no native way to measure any other customer satisfaction metric apart from CSAT in Zendesk. Simply said, Zendesk’s plain two-button after-resolution survey is all you’re gonna get.

Luckily there are some 3rd party options that allow you to survey for other metrics. Using Nicereply, you can measure CSAT as well as 2 more well-established CX metrics – Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score. Each has its merit, so let’s take a look at them.

Measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) in Zendesk

NPS was developed by Bain&Co almost two decades ago as the ultimate question to gauge the loyalty of your customers. Based on their extensive research, the now legendary question “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” is the one that correlates the most with the future growth of businesses.

You can use 3rd party tools like Nicereply to set up your own NPS surveys with your Zendesk account. Nicereply allows you to create transactional after-resolution surveys, as well as place the NPS survey into any email templates you use in your workflow. You can also use campaigns to send the NPS survey to a list of customers and repeat this regularly.

Differences between NPS and CSAT

First of all, CSAT surveys usually ask questions specifically related to the performance of your support department, or an individual agent. NPS, on the other hand, asks a broad question about the company as a whole. Insights gathered from your NPS surveys can have an impact lasting far beyond your support team, with possible stakeholders being in your marketing and product departments as well.

While CSAT is typically a transactional metric, with NPS you can choose between the transactional or the relational approach. Transactional NPS would be measured in a very similar way to your CSAT surveys and that is via an after-resolution survey. When measuring relational NPS, you instead send the NPS survey regularly (usually quarterly or yearly, but this also depends on your specific customer journey) to your entire customer base or a selected segment.

Combining NPS and CSAT

NPS and CSAT both ask your customers a different question, so combining results of these two surveys can reveal unique insights about your most loyal brand advocates, as well as our customers most at risk of churn.

Using free, easy-to-use software Plot.ly, you can plot a graph that shows NPS and CSAT data along two axes. You can use this graph to divide your customers into four main categories:

1. The wasteland of lost customers

Unfortunately, these customers are at the highest risk of churn. They’re neither satisfied nor loyal, and it isn’t worth investing much of your efforts to retain them. Let these customers go.

2. Wildcards

Wildcards are an interesting quadrant. They are satisfied but disloyal customers who will be easily wooed away by your competitors.

These are your customers who are quite likely to churn. They may be impressed by the quality of your support, but not at the product bugs that led them there in the first place.

You can engage these customers by adding value to your product and educating them on product features to increase their loyalty.

3. Promoters with bad service experiences

These are your customers who love your brand but have suffered a bad experience with your company. Maybe they love your product, but their interactions with your customer support haven’t been up-to-scratch.

These are customers worth investing more time in to bring them up to the level of Advocates.

4. Advocates

You’ve struck gold with your customer Advocates. Advocates are loyal, impressed with your product support, and very likely to recommend your company to their networks.

You can use these customers for referrals, testimonials, and case studies.

Measuring Customer Effort Score (CES) with Zendesk

Customer Effort Score is a CX metric developed by CEB, and its main premise is that customers like to do business with companies, that are “easy to work with”. The more hoops your customers have to jump through to get what they want, the less loyal will they become. The underlying notion is, that customer can be satisfied with support interaction, but still frustrated with the overall support process.

Once again, to measure CES with Zendesk, you’ll have to use a 3rd party survey solution. Nicereply allows you to measure CES via an email survey after the issue is resolved. While it is technically possible to place the CES survey into other emails as well, the nature of the metric lends itself particularly well to after-resolution surveying.

Differences between CES and CSAT

There are 2 main differences between CSAT and CES. First, CES measures your support process as a whole and puts less emphasis on individual agent performance. Second, while CSAT is especially well suited to being surveyed after every customer interaction, it only makes sense to survey for CES after the issue has been resolved.

Bringing it all together

Each of these metrics asks a different question and aims to address a different part of the experience you provide.

At the lowest, most day-to-day operational level, there is CSAT, giving you insights into individual conversations and tickets. You can use this data to evaluate your agents, reward them, and train them better.

Above that rests CES, giving you an overview of your entire support process. Customer Effort Score shows you where your customers get frustrated or stuck. Use this to redesign the way your support department works. What channels do you use? How often do you make customers switch channels or agents? Is it easy to find help on your website, or is finding a direct contact like finding a needle in a haystack? All of these can be effort points for your customers.

On the highest, company-wide level, there is the NPS, measuring the loyalty of your customers and possibly giving you a forecast for your company’s future.

Measure everything

There’s is no such thing as too much data, and when it comes to your customers, it’s better to know more than less. That’s why we recommend measuring all of these CX metrics to get the fullest picture of the experience you provide to your customers.

Based on our experience, helping more than a thousand companies measuring the quality of their support, we recommend the following setup:

• Measure CSAT in every interaction, via Nicereply in-signature CSAT surveys.
• Measure CES once you resolve the ticket in your Zendesk account via an after-resolution survey.
• Measure NPS quarterly via a survey campaign sent to your customers.

Next steps

If you already have a Nicereply account, you can follow these manuals to implement this survey workflow.

• Follow this guide to include a CSAT survey in the signature of every email you send from your Zendesk account
• Follow this guide to send an after-resolution CES survey to your customers once you resolve a ticket in Zendesk

If not, you can read more about our Zendesk integration and create one here.

The post How to Survey for More Metrics in Zendesk appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

There’s always something for you to try out to push your response rates and improve your feedback program.

Based on a 2016 study by Spigit, 75% of companies want to improve their customer satisfaction and overall experience, and it is safe to assume that number only went up in recent years. One of the ways to do that is to make sure you’re getting as much customer feedback as possible, to help you guide your customer experience decisions. By now, you’re probably already measuring Customer Satisfaction, but how successful is your feedback program, and what can you do to improve it?

Survey response rate

Let’s answer the former question first – “How successful is your feedback program?”. One of the best ways to do that is to calculate your survey response rate. To do this just divide your number of responses by the number of surveys sent. The result is the percentage of customers who answered – your response rate. The base standard for Nicereply customers is 10%, but we’ve had customers report response rates even above 50%. While response rates vary greatly between different industries, anything below 10% should be a call for improvement.

Improving CSAT surveys via customization

Customizing your CSAT survey is a great way to increase your response rates, as well as the relevance of responses you get. Asking the right question, providing an adequate amount of answer options as well as making sure the customer knows who the survey is from are all great contributors towards these goals.

Customizing Zendesk’s default CSAT survey

By default, Zendesk automatically sends the survey email 24 hours after the ticket has been marked as solved, although this can be customized.

After clicking on one of the links, customers proceed to a page where they can provide further comments, or choose from a pre-defined list of causes for their dissatisfaction.

In terms of customization you can change the following:

Question

You can change the default question, “How would you rate the customer service you received?”. For example, if you want feedback on specific agents, you might ask, “How satisfied were you with your customer support agent?”.

Language

Zendesk also lets you internationalize your CSAT surveys by translating the content of the survey to different languages and then using the dynamic content placeholders.

Delivery

Lastly, you can customize the delivery of the survey. By default, the survey is dispatched 24 hours after the resolution, but you can change this by editing the automation. You can also survey only a subset of your user base by using user and organization tagging.

Customization beyond Zendesk’s CSAT

As mentioned in our overview of Zendesk’s CSAT solution, deciding to splurge in for a dedicated CSAT tool unlocks several powerful perks, with customization being one of them. While Zendesk produces an impressive suite of business tools, dedicated apps like Nicereply make the effectiveness of their surveys a primary goal, which enables them to go much deeper in terms of features. Let’s take a look at what can you customize if you use Nicereply as your CSAT solution.

Customizing questions

Nicereply gives you the option to customize survey questions to ask the exact question you have in mind, as well as additional follow up questions. The survey world is your oyster!

Here are just some of the examples our customers use in their surveys:

• How nice was my reply?
• How did we do today?
• Are you satisfied with the resolution of your ticket today?
• Let us know how our service was today:
• How satisfied are you with your experience?
• Thinking specifically about the last interaction, how satisfied are you with the service you received today?
• How satisfied are you with [Company]?
  • Secondly, how satisfied were you with the customer service agent you talked to today?
• How was the help you received?

Choosing the right question is important for the relevancy of your feedback. While a general question like “How satisfied were you today?” might net you enough responses, chances are a question like “How satisfied were you with the help you received?” might subconsciously lead customers to talk more about their interaction with your support department, than their general feelings about your company.

Asking additional questions

Asking additional questions is also a powerful tool to get more information out of your customers. Once you get your customers to commit to answering one question, chances are much higher they’ll answer an additional one compared to a subsequent survey.

You can also use this to gauge different aspects of your service, like this:

• How satisfied are you with [Company]?
  • Secondly, how satisfied were you with the customer service agent you talked to today?
• How satisfied were you with the resolution of your ticket?
  • How helpful was the customer service representative while assisting you?

Followup questions

After rating your performance, customers can also leave an additional comment by answering an open-ended follow-up question. By default, the question is, “What could we improve?”

You can, however, customize this follow up question according to your needs. Here are some other examples:

• What could we do to increase your score by just one mark?
• If you could change just one thing about our product, what would it be?

Customizing rating scales

Limiting the variety of answers also limits the amount of information you get from customer feedback. Not all customer interactions fit the binary boxes of Good or Bad. Sometimes customers feel rather “meh”, or perhaps “good, but not great”.

Using Nicereply, you can choose from 3 different types of rating scales, to see what works best for you and your customers:

• 3 Emojis
• Thumb Up or Down
• 10 stars

You can compare the data between different scales, too, as their internal logic remains the same. Every button has a value ranging from 1 to 10. For example, the Happy face is a 10, while the neutral is a 5. Nicereply then calculates your CSAT from these values.

Instant ratings

You can also choose to enable or disable instant ratings. Instant ratings record the response as soon as your customers click the rating button. They can then alter their rating and provide additional feedback, but even if they decide to abandon the survey mid-way, you will still have their first response. You can learn more about Instant ratings in our knowledge base.

Customizing the visuals

Tweaking your survey visuals makes it more consistent with your branding, which in turn makes it easier for customers to recognize who the survey’s from. Customizing your survey also makes it more engaging than a bland text survey. All of this results in more customers answering your surveys. You can use the following tools to change how your survey looks:

Adding a company logo

Adding your company logo to the survey makes it more recognizable and grants it extra credibility.

Themes and colors

You can also choose one of the predefined themes designed to make your surveys stand out, or mix and match colors on your own.

Choosing the latter option allows you to tailor your survey design to your brand. You can change every background, text, and even the color of the rating buttons.

Customizing the delivery

In terms of post-resolution surveys, you can customize the number of hours after the resolution, before dispatching a survey, as well as use tags to target different subgroups of customers. You can also turn on over-surveying protection, to make sure you don’t send too many surveys at once to a customer who’s reached out multiple times during the last couple of days. This would probably mean a hit for your response rates as well as a severe nuisance for the customer.

Apart from surveying post-resolution, you can also place your CSAT survey directly into the signature of every email reply you send out from your Zendesk account. This means your customers can rate every interaction separately, giving you deeper insight into your support process, as well as a chance to turn around a conversation going astray.

More customizations to come

Whether you’re using Zendesk’s native survey or a dedicated survey tool like Nicereply, there’s probably always something for you to try out to push your response rates and relevance of the feedback you receive. Nevertheless, we’re working hard to bring you even more customizability in the future. Here’s a sneak peek of things to come in Nicereply. In the future, you can look forward to:

• More themes
• More rating scales
• Distinct button styles
• Deeper customization of backgrounds such as gradients and images
• And more…

If you’d like to know about these new features among the first, subscribe to our newsletter here.

The post How to customize a CSAT survey in Zendesk appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Customers who’ve had a bad experience with a company are only 40% likely to still be a customer in a year, compared to 75% of customers with great experiences sticking around.

CSAT is the most prevalent method of measuring customer satisfaction today. Businesses ranging from tech giants like Google and Apple to the smallest early-stage startups use it all around the world to see what works for their customers and what yet needs to be improved.

And for a good reason too. Interpreting the scores is easy for the employees, while customers clearly understand what’s being asked of them. Plus, if executed properly, response rates tend to be much higher than regular long-form surveys.

If the previous lines didn’t convince you, let’s look at some numbers:

• Customers who’ve had a bad experience with a company are only 40% likely to still be a customer in a year, compared to 75% of customers with great experiences sticking around.
• It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one bad experience.
• 67% of customers list a bad service experience as their main reason for churning.
• 95% of customers will share their bad experiences with friends and family.

As the famous quote by Peter Drucker says, “Whatever gets measured gets managed.” If you want to improve your customer satisfaction and prevent negative experiences, the first step is to start measuring it.

Before you can start measuring CSAT within your Zendesk account, there’s a decision you must do first. Should you use the built-in solution provided by Zendesk, or should you splurge for a dedicated CSAT tool? We’ll try to help you make that decision with this post.

Built-in Zendesk CSAT tool overview

Zendesk Support comes with a built-in solution for measuring CSAT. Enabling it allows your customers to rate your experience on a binary scale of “Good, I’m Satisfied.” or “Bad, I’m unsatisfied.”. By default, Zendesk automatically sends the survey email 24 hours after the ticket has been marked as solved, although this can be customized.

After clicking on a “Good, I’m satisfied.” link, customers are taken to a page where they can provide further comments.

Unsatisfied customers who click on “Bad, I’m unsatisfied link” are then taken to a page where they can also provide comments, as well as choose from a pre-defined list of causes for their dissatisfaction. Selecting a reason is optional, as well as leaving a comment.

In terms of customizing the survey, there’s very little that you can do. Zendesk uses system placeholders to display pre-defined survey templates in your email templates. The default option is a simple question written in bold with 2 links underneath it:

Using individual placeholders for positive and negative answers, you can get a slightly more stylized version, but you’re still stuck with the same scale of 2 answers.

Apart from the visuals, you can also customize the wording to the question.

Pros: Why use the built-in Zendesk CSAT

Now that we’ve seen the overview of the built-in Zendesk CSAT tool, let’s see what makes it a good choice for your customer feedback program.

Pro: Hassle-free setup

You don’t need to register with any 3rd party vendors, create any accounts, copy any API keys, or look for any misplaced login credentials. Being a part of Zendesk Support’s offering, all you need to do to enable the built-in CSAT tool is to head to the settings page of your Zendesk account. There you can allow your customers to rate your tickets and thus start collecting customer feedback. You, however, do need to be an admin to make this change, and you also have to be running on the right Zendesk plan (professional or enterprise).

Pro: Simple to understand

While lacking in terms of customization, the simplicity of Zendesk’s CSAT solution can be perceived as a good thing. It’s easy to set up, easy to work with, and most of all, easy to understand. One question with binary “Good” or “Bad” answers leaves little room for interpretation, misunderstandings, or any kind of ambiguity. Your satisfied customers will know where to praise, and your dissatisfied one will know how to complain.

Pro: Reliability and deliverability

Everything is handled by Zendesk, so you don’t have to worry about downtime of any 3rd party service. As long as your helpdesk is running, your surveys will be sent.

Being sent from the same service as the main information about the ticket also means less chance of surveys being caught by spam filters, resulting in potentially higher deliverability rates, although this depends on your audience.

Pro: You’re already paying for it (sort of)

Zendesk’s built-in CSAT solution is a part of Zendesk Support and you technically don’t have to pay anything extra to start using it. However, there’s a slight catch, with customer satisfaction ratings being available only to Professional, Enterprise, and Elite plans. If you’re currently using Zendesk Support on an Essential or Team plan, your only options are to look for a 3rd party CSAT solution or to upgrade your Zendesk plan.

Cons: Why use a dedicated CSAT tool

Zendesk CSAT is a solid place to start when measuring CSAT, but let’s take a look at some reasons why you might want to go with a more powerful dedicated tool.

Con: Limited customizability

Dedicated CSAT tools like Nicereply allows you to customize your surveys to a much greater degree. You can choose from several different scales like 10 stars, 3 emojis, or 2 thumbs to collect a much diverse range of feedback.

You can also add a logo, change the colors to go with your branding, and even add an extra question to get more information.

Con: Only measuring CSAT

Zendesk’s built-in solution allows you to only measure Customer Satisfaction Score, but there are other interesting CX metrics, that can enrich your customer feedback program.

Both Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score can provide you with powerful insight to improve your customer experience. You can also implement them, without sending more emails…

Con: Surveying post-resolution only

Zendesk sends its CSAT survey only once the ticket is marked as solved. While this gives you a good idea of how the customer feels after the resolution, it provides little insight into how he feels during the support process.

Dedicated tools can also do post-resolution surveys, but Nicereply also allows you to place your CSAT survey directly into the signature of every email reply you send out to your customers. This means your customers can rate an agent after every reply, giving you deeper insight into your support process, as well as a chance to turn around conversations that frustrate your customers.

Another benefit is that measuring CSAT in an email signature allows you to use a previously occupied “email slot” to measure a different metric, such as CES or NPS, post-resolution to get even more feedback.

Con: Your data is locked in Zendesk

Now we love Zendesk as much as the next guy, but the fact is that businesses sometimes change their stacks. Having all your customer feedback as part of Zendesk Support means, that if you do decide to migrate to another platform, those customer ratings are going to get left behind.

Even if you don’t migrate, you’re still unnecessarily siloing your feedback data, without a possibility to connect it to other systems. 3rd party solutions like Nicereply provide a wide array of integrations to share your feedback between different systems, like helpdesks, call-center systems, and CRMs.

Con: Rudimentary reporting

Zendesk allows you to see your overall customer satisfaction score, individual ratings, comments, and satisfaction reasons (if enabled) for up to the past 90 days.

Dedicated CSAT tools provide a much more in-depth look at your data. With Nicereply, you can see all the stats and trends in one place. You can also see ratings of individual agents, and also organize them into teams, which you can then evaluate and compare.

Every rating is also linked to its respective ticket in Zendesk Support, so you never lose the context of a given rating. Every rating you ever receive is stored, with no 90 days limits.

Con: Only available to Zendesk professional plans and up

As mentioned before, customer satisfaction ratings are available only to Professional, Enterprise, and Elite plans. There’s currently no way to enable the native Zendesk solution for those currently using an Essential or Team plan.

Conclusion

Zendesk’s CSAT tool is a solid choice for teams just starting to measure customer satisfaction, but teams who’ve been at it for a while, power-users, and teams using entry-level Zendesk plans will probably do better by getting a dedicated CSAT tool.

If you’d like to see a comparison of all the CSAT tools, it’s currently available on the Zendesk Marketplace. Check it out.

The post Pros and Cons of Using the Built-in Zendesk CSAT Solution appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Companies are storing three times as much data on Zendesk as they did five years ago, and twice as much data per customer.

When it comes to knowing what customers really want, data can be illuminating. Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report dropped earlier this month, combining the data of the 45,000 companies using Zendesk with an external survey of thousands of agents, managers and customers.

We dived into this report to pull out some of the most important data points you need to know to build your 2020 customer service strategy. These six trends might surprise you, but they should definitely impact the way you think about helping your customers.

Good service matters most to the youngest generation

In a world where convenience is king, it might seem like good service isn’t as important anymore. Personal, human service can feel like a relic of a different era where you’d shop at the local store and everyone would know your name.

Maybe that’s why good service is most important to the younger generation. Customer service has the highest impact on customer loyalty for millennials, when compared with Gen X and Baby Boomer survey respondents. When making decisions about where to spend their money, having a great experience is their top concern.

What does this mean for you?

While it might be tempting to automate much of the customer service experience, that might not be the best approach. Yes, ease of use is important, but more and more customers are looking to form a connection with the businesses they shop with. Millennials want to develop a personal relationship with vendors and to feel like their loyalty matters.

Fewer than 30% of companies offer self-service, live chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots or peer-to-peer communities.

A surprisingly low number of companies have deployed helpful tools that extend the capability of their help desk. Only a third of companies offer self-service or have an active customer community forum, and less than a third of companies offer chat, in-app messaging, or bots.

This is surprising because, in spite of customer’s preferences, low effort tools are still not being adopted. According to Zendesk’s survey, “69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own, and 63% of customers always or almost always start with a search on a company’s online resources when they have an issue.”

Furthermore, helping customers to resolve their issue quickly is the most important aspect of providing a good customer service experience.

What does this mean for you?

There’s a huge opportunity to beat the competition when it comes to offering a low-effort experience that your customers will love. While adoption rates are increasing, most companies haven’t jumped on board yet. Adopting new tools like in-context self-service and an AI-powered knowledge base can make you stand out in the crowd.

Companies that effectively leverage customer data solve four times the number of customer requests.

Companies are storing three times as much data on Zendesk as they did five years ago, and twice as much data per customer. We’re collecting more data than ever on our customers – but how are we using it effectively? According to the report, “companies that leverage the most customer data — those in the top
25% of managing data relative to other similar companies — see 36% faster resolutions and a 79% reduction in wait times.”

Using data to help resolve customer inquiries effectively can make a big difference to your customer experience. Customers don’t like repeating themselves, and they don’t like providing information that you should already have available.

What does this mean for you?

Identify where customer data is not being used effectively. See where you can connect platforms together (such as your feedback tool, your billing software and your internal logs) to get more context about your customer’s journey.

The Phone is Still King.

Thought phone support was dead? Think again. Two-thirds of customers say that they resolve their issues over the phone.

Phone usage was the fastest growing customer service channel (alongside chat support) of the last five years. In fact, 68% of companies offer phone as a channel, with an additional 16% of managers expecting to add it over the next 12 months (which represents a 25% growth).

What does this mean for you?

It’s not time to ditch the phone lines yet. Depending on who your customers are and what your business model is, it might make sense to include phone support in your 2020 customer support plan.

The Chief Customer Officer is on the rise.

In the last five years, the number of dedicated customer experience executives grew more than 1000%, in both B2B and B2C companies, according to Forrester. That same report found that approximately 70% of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies have a CCO (or similar) in place to ensure the customer experience gets the attention it deserves.

What does this mean for you?

Evaluate who owns the customer experience in your organization. When large scale projects have to be coordinated across multiple functions, who is accountable for success? If your answer is “no-one” it may be worth assigning one executive the responsibility of serving customers.

Many customer service teams don’t have a dedicated method to measure their success.

In order to know if you’re heading in the right direction, you need to define a measure of success. Do you want to focus on speed of resolution? Reducing churn rates? Personalized service? If you don’t know what your priorities are, it’s impossible to make bigger strategic decisions. And it’s tough for your agents to know what they should be focussing on.

A surprising 28% of teams don’t quantify their success at all. This number is much higher in smaller teams where processes may not have been put in place yet. As teams grow, the importance of creating KPIs and relevant goals increases.

What does this mean for you?

If you are a growing team, it’s time to determine how you measure success. Of the teams that do have methods put in place, 46% use customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to measure success. Collecting customer feedback through CSAT tools is a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of your customer’s feelings.

Get ahead of the competition

Customers are clear on what they want – a dedication to good service, fast and easy answers and a variety of contact channels. However, most companies haven’t yet caught up to what customers are looking for.

This gap represents a huge opportunity for companies looking to capture a larger market share. By investing in customer service improvements, you can rocket ahead of the competition. Listen to what today’s customers are asking for, and you can win on customer experience alone.

The post 6 Surprising Stats in Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.